Australia - Northside Wizards is a successful basketball team based in Brisbane which runs sections for men, women, and juniors. Competing in the NBL1 Central, Australia’s second division basketball league, the team’s home fixtures take place at the Northside Indoor Sports Centre in Zillmere, where the Wizards recently took steps to improve the game-day experience of fans by improving the audio provision on their main court.
The Wizards have been clients of Brisbane-based supplier Brisbane Sound Group (BSG) for more than 25 years, and consulted with the audio, visual and lighting specialists about the best way forward. With its experienced sales, install and hire departments, BSG is a one-stop shop that can meet the audio needs of a wide range of settings. BSG Installation and project manager, Josiah Kerridge, took account of the venue and designed a system based on Optimal Audio commercial loudspeakers. He takes up the story:
“Following some discussion at games during 2023, the club asked us to propose a competitively priced system that would both enhance the game-day experience and be easy to operate. We’d recently been introduced to Optimal Audio by Audio Brands Australia and could see straight away that the Cuboid Series would be the perfect fit for what would be a fairly challenging brief.
“It’s quite a reverberant space with limited rigging positions at a height of around 10 metres above the court – we had to cover ground level seating as well as a single section of tiered seating. An average attendance for an NBL1 game in the court is more than a thousand fans. The Cuboid loudspeakers fell within the budget, had the required SPL for the throw, and fitted the spec in terms of size and weight. Their multiple rigging points also allowed us plenty of flexibility.”
BSG installed a system comprising eight Cuboid 15 two-way full range passive 15” loudspeakers and two Sub 15 high-power sub-bass loudspeakers. The speakers fired outwards towards the seating areas around two centrally mounted subs.
Josiah continues: “Being such a reverberant space it was always going to be tricky to deploy a system that would be loud enough to be intelligible, but the Cuboid configuration did the job and the client is super happy. The system comfortably covers background music and game sound effects, while also delivering great clarity of speech over loud crowd noise.”
Northside Wizards’ CEO, Mark Wrobel, adds, “The work that Brisbane Sound Group have completed with the sound upgrade at Northside Indoor Sports Centre has changed our lives. The ability to have crystal clear sound available at the touch of a button helps us provide a better environment for our members as well as enabling us to communicate clearly at domestic competitions and special events. The sound quality and clarity of speech provided by the Optimal Audio speakers is second to none and has made our venue a far more friendly space.”
